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   <h1>gemini+submit:// (was Re: Uploading Gemini content)</h1>
    <b>solderpunk</b> 
    <a href="mailto:gemini%40lists.orbitalfox.eu?Subject=Re%3A%20gemini%2Bsubmit%3A//%20%28was%20Re%3A%20Uploading%20Gemini%20content%29&amp;In-Reply-To=%3C20200614150547.GF363%40SDF.ORG%3E" title="gemini+submit:// (was Re: Uploading Gemini content)">solderpunk at SDF.ORG
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    <i>Sun Jun 14 16:05:47 BST 2020</i>
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<pre>On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 02:33:52AM +0200, Petite Abeille wrote:
&gt;<i> 
</i>&gt;<i> Unfortunately, the 1024 bytes limit doesn't get  us very far. The diff itself is ~14K. ~5K compressed. Too big for one request.
</i>&gt;<i> 
</i>&gt;<i> Fossil delta format [2] is much more compact than diff -u, but still weights ~4K, 2K compressed. And this is not accounting for data: encoding overhead.
</i>&gt;<i> 
</i>&gt;<i> So, hmmm, 1024 bytes is quite a limiting factor if one must use only one request.
</i>
Well, look - 1024 bytes as a maximum URL length is a value I more or
less plucked out of the air without deep consideration, simply because
the elements passed around by a protocol *should* have a well-defined
maximum length so people can allocate appropriately sized memory
buffers, etc.  I certainly *wasn't* thinking about using queries to
upload content, I was thinking of "ordinary URLs" and so 1024 bytes
seemed hugely generous.

I believe most web browsers have a larger maximum URL length.  I did
look into this briefly for some reason - IIRC, Internet Explorer has/had
the smallest limit, and it was either 2048 or 4096 bytes.

According to GUS, currently more than half of the text/gemini content
out there is less than 1.2 KiB in size.  If URLs were allowed to be 2048
bytes long, all that content could be uploaded as a query.

I do not have hard numbers on this (Alex may be able to provide them),
but I would *imagine* that most edits to wikis, when expressed as diffs,
would also be much less than 1 KiB.

Can we solve a lot of these issues by bumping up our maximum URL length
and, perhaps, defining a new 1x status code meaning "I'm asking you for
some input and in this context it's quite reasonable that you might want
to submit something on the long side", which clients could optionally
respond to by launching a text editor instead of just reading a single
line of input?  Clients which chose to support this code would become
the preferred clients of wiki enthusiasts or people who don't want to or
don't know how to use scp etc.

Heck, wiki nerds could write their own clients which can launch an
editor pointed at a local copy of the resource being viewed, then
calculate a diff in some format and submit *that* as a query, and the
wiki software the server runs could apply the diff.  The special wiki
editing clients could even do your suggested chunked transfer thing for
very large diffs, if the wiki servers all implemented a standard API for
such a thing.

It should also be very easy to write an app targetted at "non-technical"
authors which lets them submit chunks of writing up to 2 KiB or so, with
an "append" link at the submission confirmation page to submit a follow
up chunk.  It wouldn't necessarily be the smoothest experience in the
world, but if most content could be written in a single request and 99%
with one or two "append" requests, I think it would be usable enough.
Heck, this is the "slow internet", right?  A little bit of inconvenience
as part of a careful and deliberate process should not scare us away.

In general, solving perceived problems with the limitations that Gemini
imposes by combining the "primitives" which are already there in
creative new ways, even if they are very slightly clunky, makes me far,
far happier than adding in additional more advanced features to remove
those limitations.  If we discover really useful and generally
applicable constructions that can be built in this way, we can give them
names, standardise them, and clients can choose to impelement them in
ways which hide the clunkiness from the user.  It would be wonderful,
though, if they were still usable in a clunky way by a knowledgable
users in clients which didn't support them explicitly.

In short, think like FORTH. :)

&gt;<i> A bit clunky, but workable :D
</i>
Maybe we should adopt this as an official motto? :p

Cheers,
Solderpunk
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